From Egypt to Japan

by Henry M. Field

But perhaps the reader will think that we have had enough of this, and will gladly turn to a less revolting form of superstition. The great sight of Benares is the bathing in the Ganges. This takes place in the morning. We rose early the next day, and drove down to the river, and getting a boat, were rowed slowly for hours up and down the stream. It is lined with temples and palaces, which descend to the water by flights of steps, or ghauts, which at this hour are thronged with devout Hindoos. By hundreds and thousands they come down to the river's brink, men, women, and children, and wade in, not swimming, but standing in the water, plunging their heads and mumbling their prayers, and performing their libations, by taking the water in their hands, and casting it towards the points of the compass, as an act of worship to the celestial powers, especially to the sun.

As the boatmen rested on their oars, that we might observe the strange scene, C—— started with horror to see a corpse in the water. It was already half decayed, and obscene birds were fluttering over it. But this is too common a sight in Benares to raise any emotion in the breast of the Hindoo, whose prayer is that he may die on the banks of the Ganges. Does his body drift down with the stream, or become food for the fowls of the air, his soul floats to its final rest in the Deity, as surely as the Ganges rolls onward to the sea.

But look! here is another scene. We are approaching the Burning Ghaut, and I see piles of wood, and human bodies, and smoke and flame. I bade the boatmen draw to the shore, that we might have a clearer view of this strange sight. Walking along the bank, we came close to the funeral piles. Several were waiting to be lighted. When all is ready, the nearest male relative walks round and round the pile, and then applies to it a lighted withe of straw. Here was a body just dressed for the last rites. It was wrapped in coarse garments, perhaps all that affection could give. Beside it stood a woman, watching it with eager eyes, lest any rude hand should touch the form which, though dead, was still beloved. I looked with pity into her sad, sorrowful face. What a tale of affection was there!—of love for the life that was ended, and the form that was cherished, that was soon to be but ashes, and to float away upon the bosom of the sacred river.

Another pile was already lighted, and burning fiercely. I stood close to it, till driven away by the heat and smoke. As the flames closed round the form, portions of the body were exposed. Now the hair was consumed in a flash, leaving the bare skull; now the feet showed from the other end of the pile. It was a ghastly sight. Now a horrid smell filled the air, and still the pile glowed like a furnace, crackling with the intense heat, and shot out tongues of flame that seemed eager to lick up every drop of blood.

In this disposal of the dead there is nothing to soothe the mourner like a Christian burial, when the body is committed to the earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, when a beloved form is laid down under the green turf gently, as on a mother's breast.

The spectacle of this morning, with the similar one at Allahabad, have set me a-thinking. I ask, What idea do the Hindoos attach to bathing in the Ganges? Is it purification or expiation, or both? Is it the putting away of sin by the washing of water; the cleansing of the body for the sins of the soul? Or is there in it some idea of atonement? What is the fascination of this religious observance? Perhaps no stranger can fully understand it, or enter into the feeling with which the devout Hindoo regards the sacred river. The problem grows the more we study it. However we approach the great river of India, we find a wealth of associations gathering around it such as belongs to no other river on the face of the earth. No other is so intimately connected with the history and the whole life of a people. Other rivers have poetical or patriotic associations. The ancient Romans kept watch on the Tiber, as the modern Germans keep watch on the Rhine. But these are associations of country and of patriotic pride—not of life, not of existence, not of religion. In these respects the only river in the world which approaches the Ganges is the Nile, which, coming down from the Highlands of Central Africa, floods the long valley, which it has itself made in the desert, turning the very sands into fertility, and thus becoming the creator and life-giver of Egypt.

What the Nile is to Egypt, the Ganges is to a part of India, giving life and verdure to plains that but for it were a desert. As it bursts through the gates of the Himalayas, and sweeps along with resistless current, cooling with its icy breath the hot plains of India, and giving fertility to the rice fields of Bengal, it may well seem to the Hindoo the greatest visible emblem of Almighty power and Infinite beneficence.

But it is more than an emblem. The ancient Egyptians worshipped the Nile as a god, and in this they had the same feeling which now exists among the Hindoos in regard to the Ganges. It is not only a sacred river because of its associations; it is itself Divine, flowing, like the River of Life in the Book of Revelation, out of the throne of God. It descends out of heaven, rising in mountains whose tops touch the clouds—the sacred mountains which form the Hindoo Kylas, or Heaven, the abode of the Hindoo Trinity—of Brahma and Shiva and Vishnu. Rushing from under a glacier in the region of everlasting snow, it seems as if it gushed from the very heart of the Dweller on that holy mount; as if that flowing stream were the life-blood of the Creator. When the Hindoo has seized this idea, it takes strong hold of his imagination. As he stands on the banks of the Ganges at night, and sees its broad current quivering under the rays of the full moon, it seems indeed as if it were the clear stream flowing through the calm breast of God himself, bearing life from Him to give life to the world. Hence in his creed it has all the virtue and the "divine power that belongs in the Christian system to the blood of Christ. It makes atonement for sins that are past." "He that but looks on the Ganges," says the Hindoo proverb, "or that drinks of it, washes away the stains of a hundred births; but he that bathes in it washes away the stains of a thousand births." This is a virtue beyond that of the Nile, or the rivers of Damascus, or of the Jordan, or even of

Siloa's brook

That flowed fast by the oracle of God.